Ripple’s Swell Conference 2018 to Kick-Off Today

| Updated
by Bhushan Akolkar · 3 min read
Ripple’s Swell Conference 2018 to Kick-Off Today
Photo: Swell by Ripple

The keynote address will be delivered by former U.S. president Bill Clinton followed by a number of visionaries from the financial space speaking on streamlining global payments.

Swell, one of Ripple’s major annual event is to kick-off starting today, October 1st. As described on its homepage, “Swell connects the world’s leading experts on policy, payments and technology for the most provocative dialogue in global payments today.”

Things to Expect at the Swell Conference

The key highlight of the event is that the former U.S. president Bill Clinton will be the keynote speaker for the two-day conference. Following Clinton’s keynote address, a number of visionaries are expected to speak on diverse topics but relating to streamlining the global financial payment industry.

Some of the biggest names from the payments and technology industry include Honorable Sunil Sabharwal from the IMF, Ed Metzger from Banco Santander, Colin Dinn from Siam Commercial Bank, Tokunboh Ishmael from Alitheia Capital, R.J. Pittman, former Chief Product Officer of eBay; and Prajit Nanu from InstaReM.

Moreover, on September 30, top representatives from several other giant banking institutions like Standard Chartered, Banco Santander, Bank of America Merill Lynch, MUFG Bank, SBI, American Express and Siam Commercial Bank met to discuss the rules governing the company’s global payments network called RippleNet. As the RippleNet continues to scale with incumbent participants, these rules are necessary to bring proper standardization in the process.

Siam Commercial Bank to Implement the Multi-Hop Feature

Last Friday, September 28, the Siam Commercial Bank became the financial institution on RippleNet to implement a key feature called “multi-hop” which allows them to settle payments on behalf of other financial institutions present on the network. The “multi-hop” feature eliminates the need of having a one-to-one connection or a bilateral relationship between the institutions to settle payments. The feature will allow SCB to receive and forward payments without this connection between the originator and the beneficiary.

In the official blog post, Ripple wrote:

“A lack of a standard integration in ASEAN for regional cross-border payments currently requires expensive work arounds. Neighboring countries relying on the correspondent banking system have to first convert currency into U.S. dollars, then settle across multiple correspondent banks before finally being exchanged to the currency used at the beneficiary institution. This cumbersome process requires numerous fees, including two sets of foreign exchange. As a result, there is little to no support for the low-value payments that small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and remitters need to make.”

While explaining how multi-hop can solve this issue, the company noted:

“With multi-hop, financial institutions can connect directly to SCB, which can settle and payout across the region without exchanging currencies multiple times and adding heavy fees. The result is a seamless payments experience into and out of the ASEAN region. For smaller financial institutions which previously did not have the ability to make payments into ASEAN, multi-hop will democratize access to those countries and make payments easier, regardless of payment size or their financial institution’s pool of liquidity.”

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